under Velasquez, while De Leon went over to
Puerto Rico to begin its colonial career; and the
Cuban expedition was the starting-point of Cortez
and the conquest of Spanish possessions on the
mainland. The mother colony itself settled down to
quiet with no history separable from that of the discovery,
the colonising, and the doings of the traders
and buccaneers who came to infest these waters.
Ovando explored along the southern coast and
founded a town called Salva Tierra near the present
A u x Cayes, but the Spanish settlements were mostly
within easy reach of Santo Domingo or in the great
plain over the mountains, which sloped to the sea at
Samana and at Monte Cristi. After the wretched
natives had died out and negro bondmen had been
brought in, plantation life began its infancy and its
slow growth.
In 1585, Drake captured the city of Santo Domingo,
but only to exact ransom and sail away; and
the languishing colony was occasionally harried on
its coasts by marauding enemies of Spain or of all
peaceable mankind. After the French refugees from
St. Christopher joined the first “ boucaniers” in possession
of Tortuga, the Spanish drove them out
more than once, with the result that they finally settled
upon the western end of the larger island, at
Petit Goave on the north side of the southern peninsula
within the gulf. They held on there and
were joined by other Frenchmen. They established
plantations and bought negro slaves, trading chiefly
with the buccaneers. Unlike the other colonists,
they obtained African women as well as men, and
their slaves increased in number spontaneously,
instead of dying out on their hands, and had a
superior physical vigour. The colonists built a fort
at the head of the bay which they called Port-au-
Prince, but just when and in honour of what prince
seems to be unknown. But these Frenchmen raised
sugar and coffee and cotton and established a
flourishing trade, and when the peace treaty of
Ryswick was signed in 1697, Spain was fain to concede
to France the colony which had grown up on
the western end of “ Little Spain.” The French
called their colony St. Domingue, while the Spanish
retained the name of Española, or Hispaniola; and
it was not until the former declared its independence
that it assumed the old native appellation of Haiti
for itself. After the Spanish colony had passed
through its transformation to a like state of independence,
it took the name of Santo Domingo, and
each of the two republics acquired the habit of calling
the whole island by its own name. Unfortunately,
the rest of the world has accepted both names
for the island and used them indiscriminately, instead
of leaving them to designate the two nations,
and retaining the original Spanish title in its Latinised
form for the whole land.
It was a little more than one third of the area of
the island that was ceded to France, and the boundary
was not definitely fixed until 1777, and has been
in dispute most of the time since. The two colonies
grew side by side, not always peaceably when their
mother countries were quarrelling, but without any
serious contests between themselves. But the